serimachi
Member
- Pronoun
- he
Lately things have been really taking a turn for the better in my life. I'm finally in a place where I feel secure and emotionally stable (which has a lot to do with the feeling secure thing.)
Long story, but had a fairly unhappy childhood and moderately unhappy adolescence--as a child was more directly abused, as an adolescent more neglected. I lived with just my dad as a teenager, and we mostly communicated through post-it notes. He was reeling a lot from his recent divorce from my stepmom, coping with a pretty severe depression, and partly as a way of coping, I think, started absorbing a lot more religious and conservative ideology. It was clear he loved me, but he took big issue with me being gay and an atheist, and after trying and violently failing at counseling we mostly settled on just being roommates. (With the occasional EXPLOSIVE fight--which to be fair, after years of being pretty isolated and demeaned by my stepmom, I started to gain a bit of a backbone and a support system in college, and while it was positive that I began sticking up for myself a little bit, I probably would have the ability to let things go a lot more these days.)
The summer I graduated high school, I met a man at a music festival I attended with my friends. I don't want to get too into that, but it got very groom-y and I started to turn to him as a surrogate dad and also as my first boyfriend. The day I turned 18, I moved out of my house with only the clothes on my back and a manilla folder with some documents, and into this guy's apartment many miles away. I left my dad a letter enumerating his failures, and gave a very opaque version of the truth to my two remaining contact points in my family, my sister and my grandmother. Ensuring, basically, that I felt I had no support system when things went sour.
Things turned sour, obviously. Suicidally, soul-crushingly sour. That was obvious after probably a couple of weeks, but it lasted a couple of years. I was far too frightened, self-doubting, and confused to leave. (You might say I was in a common situation, where I could never snap out my depression enough to take the steps to get out of the situation that is causing my deppression. Except also the whole obsessive first-love blinders were on and I wouldn't have even allowed myself to think it might be the source of my unhappiness. "Must be a genetic predisposition, like my mom, and not... the red-hot stove that I'm resting my hand on!")
My time in college was filled with a lot of debilitating depression, but gradual progress as I eventually cut the guy out of my life with the help and support of a very good friend. With my scholarship, some small government loans, and a part-time job I found, I managed to scrape by--but I was always living on a knife's edge of financial anxiety and self-doubt. I was actually making enough to put away some money with that part-time job, but I was still living like a desperate person, carefully budgeting $30 a month for food and supplementing what I could find on-campus and from a local food pantry.
Things getting simultaneously better in some ways, and worse in others, which led to my next dramitically poor choice. Schoolwork got harder, and I failed Calculus II twice, a required course for my major, and I tried hard. I got obsessed with a startup idea, then ran into a bunch of roadblocks. I got a freelance gig through my brother that paid pretty well. And to boot--I never really got over the suicidal ideation thing. It got easier as I started to become a bit more self-reliant, but my self-esteem was still crushingly low and I began to cope with the torturous mental doubts at night with alcohol. (And weirdly--they don't tell you this in movies--alcoholism kind of worked in a sense--it did a lot to blunt the lowest lows of the depression, gave me an immediate fix and something to look forward to when I got a low mood, helped me sleep. Allowed me to pretend like I was doing well to myself and to others.) I dissembled to people I had a great connection with, like my best friend, my boss, and my sister, that I should have instead been leaning on and using as support to help plow forward with the bumpy-but-upward path I was on.
And I started doing that thing I always did when I feel trapped and unhappy--fantasy escapism. As a kid it was imagining I was in a Pokemon world or Harry Potter or something (I read those books dozens of times.) As a teenager, it was packing my bags with camping equipment, writing goodbye letters, hopping on trains, and then hopping off as they picked up speed and walking miles back home. And as a college student, it was returning to India, a place I had done a study abroad in and had traveled to with my aforementioned my much older Indian surrogate-dad-boyfriend. The place fascinated me and held a great stature in my imagination. I started learning Hindi, making plans, contacting friends and researching plane tickets. Until finally before I knew it, I had taken out a bunch of debt with no real intention of paying it or ever coming back. I dropped out of college, and that escape of mine was coming to fruition. I rationalized that it was something of a hail-mary--if it helped me feel better, than great, if not, I could always kill myself afterwards.
This post is getting way too long, so I'll brush over this part. Let's just say I spent about a year and a half there. There were parts that were very fun and interesting, but thing got very low and bad again as I started getting more and more anxious and kept seeking more and more things to keep my mind either distracted or dulled. Things turned upwards and I got excited about the future again when I got romantically involved with a wonderful guy, but he had his own issues to deal with, and he didn't say it, but I think it was clear as rain to him that I was not in a place for any sort of commitment. Things got worse. In the end, I ended up escorted onto an aeroplane by a policeman. (There was a brief interlude where I escaped the police and went to a village, and afterwards I ended up turning myself in voluntarily--so that's my one point of solace there, that I ultimately chose to live and chose to come back.)
I stayed with my best friend in college for a little bit in NYC. The trauma of everything left me less emotionally stable than I had ever been, but my choice to come back and rebuild things and the knowledge that everything was now out in the open for everyone I loved, there was nothing more to hide, and yet they still fucking loved me somehow, made me a lot lighter and freer. I remember my second day in New York, when my friend and I walked to a park, and we went to the grass to sit down. The grass was cool, and smelled like, well, grass--it was one of those things I missed while in India without realising it. One of those things I almost didn't get to experience ever again. I started crying there so much that a couple of people came over and asked if I needed help. I really needed that cry. And it wouldn't be the last one. (After that long-overdue, culminating cry in the grass, I could hardly walk a block without randomly bursting into tears.)
I moved to back to Philadelphia, and stayed in the attic of my former boss and her family--a simple and lovely family who had had me over for every holiday dinner when I was living there. I still cried a lot and stared blankly at walls when I had nothing else to occupy my time, but the simple companionship of family--"Hey, does anyone want to play Mario?" "Hey, can you help me chop these onions?"--kept me occupied and my hands busy. I got on medicare and found some free LGBT-focused therapy. I got a part-time job at an Indian restaurant (hindi-language skills helped me past the racism hiring screen). I started software work at my old university, a temporary full-time contract that turned to a half-time permanent position--ultimately measley cash for a software engineer in the states, but way more money than I needed to live on. I made some quality friends. I found an apartment to sublease, kept busy with freelance work, and things just kept looking up.
After all this, I'm thrilled and proud to say that I'm going back to my home town at the end of this month for the first time in almost six fucking years. I'm going to stay with my dad for two months (until my next lease starts with my aforementioned friends) who I've seen and visited with a few times since coming back. I'm going to live with my little brother and I'm going to kick his butt at Pokemon. I'll see my nephew I never met, my grandma and grandpa and aunts and uncles and cousins (social-distancing permitting), and hopefully even find the time to go camping.
And yesterday, I just got a freelance contract for a company in Los Angeles for $45 fucking dollars an hour. $45 an hour, people. That's crazy money to me. At my $25 an hour in my university, I was making more per hour than either of my parents ever made in their lives. And I know it's not the end, and problems can come up, but if nothing else with the job experience I get at this place I finally feel like I've made it, and like I can finally breathe and stop wondering if I've ever gonna be in a situation where I can't feed myself. In fact I can start to dream again--just more safely and responsibly. And I can fucking buy the strawberries at the supermarket, instead of putting them in my basket and then back on the shelf and then back in my basket three fucking times--or fucking shoplifting, which yeah, was a thing I used to do.
If you read all this, thank you! It was supposed to be one paragraph about hey, I'm making $45 fucking bucks an hour now, woo hoo, but my joy about life in general lately just had to come leaking through. I don't feel shame about my life anymore, I feel pride. I want to tell people about it. Things can get better, and you know, taking the steps may seem scary but the crazy thing is that for me it's wasn't actually that hard. It's was just taking a not-that-hard step, and then another one, and then another one. Maybe all those experiences were necessary to get me to this point of inner balance, maybe they weren't, but they're all part of my story and who I am today.
Long story, but had a fairly unhappy childhood and moderately unhappy adolescence--as a child was more directly abused, as an adolescent more neglected. I lived with just my dad as a teenager, and we mostly communicated through post-it notes. He was reeling a lot from his recent divorce from my stepmom, coping with a pretty severe depression, and partly as a way of coping, I think, started absorbing a lot more religious and conservative ideology. It was clear he loved me, but he took big issue with me being gay and an atheist, and after trying and violently failing at counseling we mostly settled on just being roommates. (With the occasional EXPLOSIVE fight--which to be fair, after years of being pretty isolated and demeaned by my stepmom, I started to gain a bit of a backbone and a support system in college, and while it was positive that I began sticking up for myself a little bit, I probably would have the ability to let things go a lot more these days.)
The summer I graduated high school, I met a man at a music festival I attended with my friends. I don't want to get too into that, but it got very groom-y and I started to turn to him as a surrogate dad and also as my first boyfriend. The day I turned 18, I moved out of my house with only the clothes on my back and a manilla folder with some documents, and into this guy's apartment many miles away. I left my dad a letter enumerating his failures, and gave a very opaque version of the truth to my two remaining contact points in my family, my sister and my grandmother. Ensuring, basically, that I felt I had no support system when things went sour.
Things turned sour, obviously. Suicidally, soul-crushingly sour. That was obvious after probably a couple of weeks, but it lasted a couple of years. I was far too frightened, self-doubting, and confused to leave. (You might say I was in a common situation, where I could never snap out my depression enough to take the steps to get out of the situation that is causing my deppression. Except also the whole obsessive first-love blinders were on and I wouldn't have even allowed myself to think it might be the source of my unhappiness. "Must be a genetic predisposition, like my mom, and not... the red-hot stove that I'm resting my hand on!")
My time in college was filled with a lot of debilitating depression, but gradual progress as I eventually cut the guy out of my life with the help and support of a very good friend. With my scholarship, some small government loans, and a part-time job I found, I managed to scrape by--but I was always living on a knife's edge of financial anxiety and self-doubt. I was actually making enough to put away some money with that part-time job, but I was still living like a desperate person, carefully budgeting $30 a month for food and supplementing what I could find on-campus and from a local food pantry.
Things getting simultaneously better in some ways, and worse in others, which led to my next dramitically poor choice. Schoolwork got harder, and I failed Calculus II twice, a required course for my major, and I tried hard. I got obsessed with a startup idea, then ran into a bunch of roadblocks. I got a freelance gig through my brother that paid pretty well. And to boot--I never really got over the suicidal ideation thing. It got easier as I started to become a bit more self-reliant, but my self-esteem was still crushingly low and I began to cope with the torturous mental doubts at night with alcohol. (And weirdly--they don't tell you this in movies--alcoholism kind of worked in a sense--it did a lot to blunt the lowest lows of the depression, gave me an immediate fix and something to look forward to when I got a low mood, helped me sleep. Allowed me to pretend like I was doing well to myself and to others.) I dissembled to people I had a great connection with, like my best friend, my boss, and my sister, that I should have instead been leaning on and using as support to help plow forward with the bumpy-but-upward path I was on.
And I started doing that thing I always did when I feel trapped and unhappy--fantasy escapism. As a kid it was imagining I was in a Pokemon world or Harry Potter or something (I read those books dozens of times.) As a teenager, it was packing my bags with camping equipment, writing goodbye letters, hopping on trains, and then hopping off as they picked up speed and walking miles back home. And as a college student, it was returning to India, a place I had done a study abroad in and had traveled to with my aforementioned my much older Indian surrogate-dad-boyfriend. The place fascinated me and held a great stature in my imagination. I started learning Hindi, making plans, contacting friends and researching plane tickets. Until finally before I knew it, I had taken out a bunch of debt with no real intention of paying it or ever coming back. I dropped out of college, and that escape of mine was coming to fruition. I rationalized that it was something of a hail-mary--if it helped me feel better, than great, if not, I could always kill myself afterwards.
This post is getting way too long, so I'll brush over this part. Let's just say I spent about a year and a half there. There were parts that were very fun and interesting, but thing got very low and bad again as I started getting more and more anxious and kept seeking more and more things to keep my mind either distracted or dulled. Things turned upwards and I got excited about the future again when I got romantically involved with a wonderful guy, but he had his own issues to deal with, and he didn't say it, but I think it was clear as rain to him that I was not in a place for any sort of commitment. Things got worse. In the end, I ended up escorted onto an aeroplane by a policeman. (There was a brief interlude where I escaped the police and went to a village, and afterwards I ended up turning myself in voluntarily--so that's my one point of solace there, that I ultimately chose to live and chose to come back.)
I stayed with my best friend in college for a little bit in NYC. The trauma of everything left me less emotionally stable than I had ever been, but my choice to come back and rebuild things and the knowledge that everything was now out in the open for everyone I loved, there was nothing more to hide, and yet they still fucking loved me somehow, made me a lot lighter and freer. I remember my second day in New York, when my friend and I walked to a park, and we went to the grass to sit down. The grass was cool, and smelled like, well, grass--it was one of those things I missed while in India without realising it. One of those things I almost didn't get to experience ever again. I started crying there so much that a couple of people came over and asked if I needed help. I really needed that cry. And it wouldn't be the last one. (After that long-overdue, culminating cry in the grass, I could hardly walk a block without randomly bursting into tears.)
I moved to back to Philadelphia, and stayed in the attic of my former boss and her family--a simple and lovely family who had had me over for every holiday dinner when I was living there. I still cried a lot and stared blankly at walls when I had nothing else to occupy my time, but the simple companionship of family--"Hey, does anyone want to play Mario?" "Hey, can you help me chop these onions?"--kept me occupied and my hands busy. I got on medicare and found some free LGBT-focused therapy. I got a part-time job at an Indian restaurant (hindi-language skills helped me past the racism hiring screen). I started software work at my old university, a temporary full-time contract that turned to a half-time permanent position--ultimately measley cash for a software engineer in the states, but way more money than I needed to live on. I made some quality friends. I found an apartment to sublease, kept busy with freelance work, and things just kept looking up.
After all this, I'm thrilled and proud to say that I'm going back to my home town at the end of this month for the first time in almost six fucking years. I'm going to stay with my dad for two months (until my next lease starts with my aforementioned friends) who I've seen and visited with a few times since coming back. I'm going to live with my little brother and I'm going to kick his butt at Pokemon. I'll see my nephew I never met, my grandma and grandpa and aunts and uncles and cousins (social-distancing permitting), and hopefully even find the time to go camping.
And yesterday, I just got a freelance contract for a company in Los Angeles for $45 fucking dollars an hour. $45 an hour, people. That's crazy money to me. At my $25 an hour in my university, I was making more per hour than either of my parents ever made in their lives. And I know it's not the end, and problems can come up, but if nothing else with the job experience I get at this place I finally feel like I've made it, and like I can finally breathe and stop wondering if I've ever gonna be in a situation where I can't feed myself. In fact I can start to dream again--just more safely and responsibly. And I can fucking buy the strawberries at the supermarket, instead of putting them in my basket and then back on the shelf and then back in my basket three fucking times--or fucking shoplifting, which yeah, was a thing I used to do.
If you read all this, thank you! It was supposed to be one paragraph about hey, I'm making $45 fucking bucks an hour now, woo hoo, but my joy about life in general lately just had to come leaking through. I don't feel shame about my life anymore, I feel pride. I want to tell people about it. Things can get better, and you know, taking the steps may seem scary but the crazy thing is that for me it's wasn't actually that hard. It's was just taking a not-that-hard step, and then another one, and then another one. Maybe all those experiences were necessary to get me to this point of inner balance, maybe they weren't, but they're all part of my story and who I am today.
